Stemcells@lunch Digested

Helena is interested in the functional effects of genetic variation in human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Her research combines computational and experimental methods in iPSC-based models to understand the cellular mechanisms that lead to rare human diseases. Helena is a human geneticist who leads a research group at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. She is a MRC eMedLab career development fellow (www.emedlab.ac.uk) and holds an appointment also at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Helena received her PhD from the University of Helsinki, where she studied the genetic mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorders. She then transitioned to functional genomics, using diverse next-generation sequencing -based assays to study how DNA sequence variation influences different levels of gene regulation in human cells, first at the University of Geneva, and then at the EMBL-EBI. She joined the Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Initiative (www.hipsci.org) in 2014 and has since foc